The Loggia in Italian Communes: Architecture and Visual Regimes Late Medieval Republics

In this book, Kim Sexton offers a cultural history of loggias and their role in modernizing late medieval urban life in north and central Italy. In a narrative organized thematically around seismic ideological shifts in republican city-states from circa 1100 to 1400, she demonstrates that the loggia--a compact and refined form of portico--was much more than a convenient shelter on public squares and streets. Not only did loggias offer protection and adornment to both casual gatherings and ceremonial events, but they also functioned as societal tools that facilitated the collective validation of changing mores. Sexton argues that the increasingly monumental loggias commissioned by Italian communes for civic, commercial, and social settings reflects the influence of three secularizing trends: the process of political legitimation in self-governing, proto-capitalistic states, which required innovative, yet prestigious architectural forms to mediate unaccustomed rituals; the development of visual regimes that steered observers toward looking upon and remembering select public activities in a favorable light; and the rise of sophisticated temporal programs of ornament that rivaled ecclesiastical art in rhetorical force. Sexton further argues that both art and architectural historians can benefit from understanding the power of built form to exhibit human interaction, not only because loggias did so in a way that made architecture and spectacle seem indivisible and semi-pictorial, but also because a multi-disciplinary approach allows these highly elaborated spaces of encounter to emerge as key elements in theorizing the late medieval Italian city.